The manufacturing names on CNBC's inaugural Disruptor50 are more alike than different, exhibiting characteristics that have come to define successful disruptions across all major sectors of the market.

Open-source technology and low-cost tools are bringing product development out of the confines of factories, reports CNBC's Julia Boorstin. And, Ben Kaufman, Quirky CEO & founder, explains how his company's innovative initiatives are changing the way things are made.

—A leap from hobbyist zeal with copter kits to monitoring agricultural fields and executing search and rescue missions. For around $400 you can (kind of) have the power of a U.S. president with your own drone.

—A collaborative, crowdsourcing platform that spans from the germ of an idea to manufactured product. In this case, it sometimes even has a manufacturing model involving patents from an industrial giant: GE.

We may still be far from the era when you can do in your home what scientists have claimed to do in laboratories, such as "growing" a human ear on a 3-D printer. And that's probably a good thing. Printing guns or replicating human organs involves ethical boundaries as fundamental as those of cloning.

Nevertheless, the 3-D printing market is expected to reach $6.5 billion over the next six years. Shapeways has already printed 1 million products. Everyone can make a market in manufacturing today.

The lone outlier among the inaugural list of manufacturing Disruptors seems downright quaint in its approach compared with the pioneers in the Maker Economy—and, to think it's a high-tech robot with the potential to make all kinds of small and midsize companies more efficient, competitive and profitable via production line improvements. It aims to return some of the outsourced manufacturing complex to the U.S., with man and machine functioning together again, though in new ways.

It would have been difficult just a few years ago to conceive of a manufacturing renaissance simultaneously occurring online, in your kid's room and under the intelligent eye of a factory floor robot named Baxter. Now it looks like we're poised to make it happen.